Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: m.] GEOGRAPHY OF ITALY. 49 times the name of Italy did not take in all the land that we now understand by that name, and that a great part of its inhabitants did not belong to the race of whom we shall have to speak of as Italians. The greater part of Northern Italy, all north of the Po and a good deal to the south of it, was counted as part of Gaul, and was inhabited by Celtic people akin to those on the other side of the Alps. Thus there was Cisalpine Gaul, Gaul on this side—that is the Italian side—of the Alps, as well as Transalpine Gaul, or Gaul beyond the Alps. Milan, Verona, 'Bologna, and other famous Italian cities thus stand in what in early limes was part of Gaul.' And the country in the extreme north-east was held by the Venetians, a people whose origin is. not very clear. They gave their name to the province of Venetia; but it must be remembered that they had nothing to do with the city of Venice, which did not begin till many ages later. And the land between the Gulf of Genoa and the Po was held by the Ligurians, a people who were most likely not Aryans at all, but a remnant of the older inhabitants, like the Basques. And people akin to the Ligurians seem also to have held the islands of Sardinia and Corsica, and part of Sicily. None of these lands were counted as part of Italy in the earliest times, so that the name of Italy belonged much more strictly to the peninsula than it does now. The name seems to have been first given to quite the southern part only, and to have gradually spread itself northwards. The map will at once show that the peninsula of Italy, though it is so long and narrow and has so great an extent of sea-coast, is not so broken up by bays and arms of the sea, nor has it so many islands round about it, as the peninsula of Greece. And though many...